Alan

Alan had a weaselly, pinched up face and a scowl to match. I always tried to avoid him and his scornful glances in the office: his voice was sour and sarcastic. So I was alarmed when I discovered I was moving from my current department to work under his supervision in his. But to do this I was being temporarily upgraded, which meant more salary, so I was half happy to go there.

But he didn't want me there. And he made this obvious. He later told me that he didn't think I was up to the job (which was a very simple and routine one) and was surprised that I could do it. I was sent to London on three day training course, and Alan was nasty about me getting time off to attend and treated me as though I was just skiving for a few days, and when I got back he told me that there were many mistakes in my work, when there obviously wasn't

He ran his department with a rod of iron and made working there difficult and miserable. He was negative and misogynistic. He would make sexist remarks about younger female workers to other male workers in front of female workers, and favour men over women. He set parameters so tightly that all individual initiative was frozen. He would criticise constantly.  I was so scared to do something wrong that I became nervous and therefore did nothing right from fear of making another of my “mistakes”. My colleagues secretly felt the same hindrances, but it was forbidden to talk, let alone openly talk, about his rule of fear. There was a cold war going on and he wrote our yearly assessments. So nobody did. And his rule continued. It came to the point when I felt so hounded and miserable that I bought some smart paper, wrote a new CV and scanned local newspapers to look for a new position elsewhere. It was a miserable place to work.

For example we were having a meeting about procedure and I made a contribution about something and Alan immediately shouted me down, that I was stupid and wrong and that I shouldn't think like this. The group went quiet, and we all felt low. Then Alan's superior, higher in the chain of command who hadn't heard the previous conversation, came over and said exactly the same thing that I had. Alan went red and nodded enthusiastically in agreement with every word he said. The others in the group inwardly laughed at him, and gave a camouflaged smiled to show some guarded support. But there was a cold fear to show any open solidarity, to criticise him.

I started to keep a diary of his behaviours towards me in case his war of attrition lead to anything more concrete like a final warning. We had a training day and colleagues from other regional offices came over so that we could train together. They laughed when they discovered that Alan was working there as a manager. They had previously worked with him at the same level before he got promoted and told anecdotes about his terrible behaviour. I thought it was just me that he hated; no, he hated everybody. They knew of a woman who had been bullied by him so much she had found the courage to make a formal complaint. This had resulted in her being moved to another department while Alan remained unchanged where he was. This didn't give any encouragement to anyone else thinking of doing the same thing.

After eighteen months I was so thankful to receive permanent promotion to another department away from Alan, with a new and more positive manager. I was so happy and so glad, it was like bright sunshine filtering down from a black sky. Suddenly my depression stopped and work became more meaningful again. It shouldn't have been like this; he should have had more monitoring and I felt that I didn't matter to higher management. Before I left he started to panic as whilst being there, I had worked hard and developed such a comprehensive and encompassing routine that he wasn't sure that my replacement would be able to smoothly carry on from it, so for my last yearly assessment before I left he gave me the job of writing an instruction manual that my replacement could learn from to do my job when I left. I felt flattered, but surely it was his job to monitor my tasks to do re-training? I was a lowly clerk, I shouldn't have had to do this. I got an exceeded mark in my assessment, probably because it saved his bacon as he had lost track of what I actually did do.

A few years later he was moved to a managerial role not involving controlling people. I learnt through the grapevine that there had been several workers on long term sick leave due to depression and stress. A messiah from the head office had quietly assessed why there was so much long term sickness and the result was that the higher management there was warned to monitor more closely the bullying that went on at lower levels, and Alan had been relieved of people managing. What was said behind closed doors I shall never know. All those times I endured this man, he finally got his karma.